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The Sarnie Business day 6 – The winds of change

| Oct 24th, 2016

Things have been looking up for The Sarnie Business, with a new stall and lots of customers. But business can go up as well as down, and when bad weather strikes, Lauren (@LaurenDouglin) and Scott (@ScottHudson), need to up their game to stay profitable. Or not.

Scott: Well the day started well. We had a few regular customers come back and we even had an emergency come through where a gentleman’s caterers for his wedding cancelled and he needed twenty-five sandwiches. And he was really putting the pressure on, he followed us into the kitchen, we had to tell him to get out for health and safety reasons. But he got his sandwiches.

Lauren: It would’ve been harder if it was during the lunchtime rush though.

Scott: Yeah, there is pressure, but we couldn’t ignore the laws of time and space. Like, “can you do it in three minutes?” No. You can’t lie to a customer even if he is panicking. So I told him we could do it in 15 minutes. And we did. That’s expectation management.

Unsurprisingly, our duo's al fresco sarnies aren't so popular in the rain

Weather woes

Scott: But later, the weather became a major challenge. At one point the wind tore down half the stall. Luckily, we prepared ourselves and made sure stuff was securely tied down, that the food items were covered. So the loss was minimal when we got the strong winds.

Lauren: And it was such a big mess to clear up. It was a lot of time and effort to clear up your stand after it’s been weathered and battered, and putting stuff away wet.

“Is that for real?”

Scott: So we put everything in the van, ready to go, and as we came back with the sign some guy just runs up, climbs in, and drives off.

Lauren: Luckily the money wasn’t in there, or the tablet and iZettle. We’ve still got some signage and the bikes, so, we still have the skeleton of what we need. But we lost the gazebo, the display, the stall, and all the things that make it look a bit prettier.

Scott: So we’ll be back tomorrow. Rain or shine.

Who was that masked man?

Profit and (a very serious) loss

Scott: Well the van was a disaster. It had everything in it. We’re not insured and now we’re going to have to go back to basics.

Lauren: But we made some profit today thanks to a couple of big orders, so we’ll be able to use that to help us come back.

Lessons learned

Lauren: Today’s lesson was, don’t leave the van unattended.

Scott: With the keys in. And we learned that we didn’t want to go into wedding catering. That was a lot of pressure because he was on the phone like, “the bride’s going to kill me”. Such a high expectation from that product, so we had to make them so fast, but also make sure it was good quality.